Pharaon So

Hoshea began to reign in Samaria in the twelfth year
of Ahaz, king of Judah. When Tiglath-Pileser died, Hoshea made some
moves towards greater independence. Against him came up Shalmaneser
[V] king of Assyria (II Kings 17:3); Hoshea submitted and became
a tribute-paying vassal. But in his sixth year, weary of the heavy oppression,
Hoshea sought protection of the king of Egypt.

And the king of Assyria found conspiracy in Hoshea: for
he had sent messengers to So king of Egypt, and brought no present
to the king of Assyria, as he had done year by year: therefore the
king of Assyria shut him up, and bound him in prison.(1)

Who was pharaoh So, to whom the king of Israel gave allegiance?
He was not identified by the historians: many efforts were made and
no acceptable assumption made.

Since most of the eighth century before the present era
Egypt was dominated by the kings of the Libyan Dynasty, and the time
when Hoshea dispatched messengers to So, king of Egypt, was about -726,
the simple solution is to identify one of the Shoshenks as the biblical
So, king of Egypt. And further, since on the walls of the Amon temple
at Karnak a bas-relief with Israeli cities depicted as tributaries to
Shoshenk Hedjkheperre of the Libyan Dynasty is a well-known and much
discussed archaeological relic, the identification of the pharaoh So
should be simple. Then why was not this identification made?

It was not made because Shoshenk of the Karnak relief
was already identified in the conventionally written history with Shishak,
the plunderer of Solomons temple and conqueror of Judah over two
hundred years before the time of king Hoshea of Samaria.

The Karnak temple has on its walls also a relief of Thutmose
III of the Eighteenth Dynasty with the captured cities of Palestine
shown as men with shields covering the body, inscribed with the names
of the cities. Shoshenks relief with its scores of similar men
symbolizing cities imitates the relief of Thutmose. But whereas the
names of cities claimed by Thutmose are all identifiable names, mainly
in Judea, the cities listed by Shoshenk are only partly identified,
and those are sites in Samaria and Galilee, not in Judea.(2)
With the reliefs of Thutmose (Shishak of the Book of Kings) we occupied
ourselves in detail in the fourth chapter of Ages in Chaos.

Thutmose left also a description of his campaign accompanying
the reliefs; besides, he pictured the booty he brought back from the
campaign and presented to the temple of Amon. We have identified this
booty, object upon object, with the description of the furnishings and
the utensils of the temple of Solomon, and found the designs, the metals,
whether gold or silver or brass, from which they were made, and the
number of individual objects in the booty (such as the number of golden
targets), all in agreement between the biblical and hieroglyphic accounts.
Nevertheless it was thought that Thutmose IIIs booty was from
a pre-Israelite Canaan.

On the other hand, Shoshenk left no record of any campaign
in Palestine; next to his relief in Karnak there is only a brief mention
of tribute from Syria (Kharu) received by Shoshenk. Therefore
it was also repeatedly said that the relief does not convey anything
beyond the fact that cities in the northern part of Palestine were claimed
as paying tribute to Shoshenk and that on the basis of his relief we
could not learn anything about a military conquest of Palestine.(3)
While the text seems to show that there was an oral or written
request from Palestine for the pharaoh to intervene,(4)
there is nothing to suggest that Shoshenk ever acted on itnevertheless,
all historians agreed that Shoshenks relief serves as a counterpart
to the biblical record of the events in the fifth year after Solomons
death when the pharaoh Shishak invaded Judea, took Jerusalem and other
fortified cities, and carried away the treasures of the Temple built
by Solomon. An omission to refer to such facts on the part of Shoshenk
did not provoke the question of the truth in the identification of Shoshenk
and Shishak.

Since, in accordance with the conventional scheme, Shoshenk
of the Karnak relief was made to Shishak (this in violation of the way
Hebrew letters are transcribed in hieroglyphics) there was no way to
identify pharaoh So as another Shoshenk of which there were more than
one in the Libyan Dynasty: the name Shoshenk could not be transcribed
as both, Shishak and So. Thus the identity of So became an unsolved,
and in the frame of that scheme, an unsolvable problem. How annoying
it became can be judged by the fact that when, some years ago, a scholar
offered to dispose of So and to read the biblical text: for he
[Hoshea] sent messengers to Sais, to the king of Egypt, Sais being
identified as the village Sa el-Hagar, and called his paper The
end of So, king of Egypt, (5)
it was acclaimed with relief as one of the most important clarifications
of biblical history in recent yearsprecisely because So,
king of Egypt was so difficult to identify with any known historical
figure. (6) Yet were So a geographical
name, the Hebrew phrase would be le So, le melech Mitzraim"to
So, to the king of Egypt. As the sentence stands, the second le
being absent, So is clearly the name of an Egyptian king, and in
the revised scheme there is no necessity to dispose of So, king of Egypt.

The seemingly complicated problem is very uncomplicated.
In the Scriptures there is a record of tribute paid by Rehoboam, son
of Solomon, to pharaoh Shishak as a result of his conquest of Judah;
and there is a record of tribute paid two hundred years later by Hoshea
of Israel to pharaoh So. In Egypt there are two reliefs depicting tribute
received from Palestine: by Thutmose III of the Eighteenth Dynasty from
the cities of Judah, and by Shoshenk of the Libyan Dynasty from the
cities of Israel. We have identified the first of the two pharaohs who
received tribute (from Rehoboam) as Thutmose III(7)
and the second, who received tribute from Hoshea, as Shoshenk. Thus
two biblical records and two Egyptian documents are in complete agreement.
Conventional history, however, by making the Libyan Shoshenk the sacker
of Solomons Temple, has no counterpart to the records of Thutmose
III concerning his campaign in Palestine or tribute paid to him; and
it has no Egyptian counterpart to the biblical record of a tribute paid
by Israel to pharaoh So.